The Druid Next Door

by E. J. Russell

  The door flew open again, and David ran in, breathless, his hair in disarray as if he’d spent the night in a wind tunnel. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. I came as soon as I got your text.” He rushed over to the sofa and dropped to his knees next to Bryce. “He’s holding his own?”

  “Yes, Davey.”

  David took Bryce’s hands and peered at his face for several moments. Then he sat back on his haunches, heaving an enormous sigh. “Yes. I think he’ll be fine. I’ll take it from here.”

  Cassie rapped her cane on the floor. “Then walk with me, Lord Maldwyn. We have more to discuss.”

  Bryce tried to keep his breathing steady, but he couldn’t.

  He couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. Something in him, the equivalent of a druid roofie, had made it possible for him to ensorcell Mal without even knowing it.

  Christ. His heart lurched and a lump formed in his throat. He’d essentially raped Mal. Twice. He should have known that someone as beautiful, as confident, as arrogant as Mal Kendrick would never have willingly submitted to gawky Bryce MacLeod without a mind-altering intervention.

  And what about what he’d felt himself? He’d gloried in that feeling of holding Mal’s will in his hand. Was this druid crap going to change him? Turn him into a sociopath like that bastard Rodric, who saw everyone as incidental to his own desires?

  “You can stop pretending,” David said, a thread of humor in his voice. “I know you’re awake.”

  Bryce opened his eyes. David smiled down at him, his eyes the color of the slough at sunset. “I . . . Sorry. I’m not feeling so great.”

  “I know. I’ll take care of that in just a minute.”

  David grasped both of Bryce’s hands, and a tingling warmth spread from the man’s fingers up Bryce’s arms.

  Bryce snatched his hands away. “Don’t.”

  David blinked at him. “It’s okay. This is kind of what I do, and it doesn’t hurt.”

  “Could you maybe make it hurt? I think I deserve it.”

  David laughed. “I mean it doesn’t hurt me. Alun is always in a tizzy because of the way fae used achubyddion in the past, and no matter how often I tell him that aid freely given is its own reward and doesn’t drain me in the least, he won’t listen.”

  “Alun. Your husband. Mal’s brother, right?”

  A flicker of worry crossed David’s face. “Yes. And if the big doofus doesn’t contact me very, very soon, I will have some words for him that he won’t want to hear.”

  Bryce smiled in spite of himself. David looked as fierce as the world’s cutest twink could look, but kittens were probably more intimidating. “If Alun is Mal’s size, I doubt words would make much of a dent.” Although . . . The grimoire had stressed the importance of the right words in conjunction with the right ingredients. Had something he’d said been the catalyst that had ignited the change in him and Mal?

  “If the words are ‘No sex until you clean up your act,’ believe me, they’ll leave a huge dent.”

  The mention of sex drained all desire for laughter out of Bryce. He zeroed in on something David said. “You said fae used the achubyddion. Do you mean like servants?”

  David shook his head as the warmth emanating from his hands curled around Mal’s heart. “Worse. Kind of like disposable battery packs. Apparently none of the idiots ever asked the achubyddion how their powers worked.” He patted Bryce’s shoulder. “If you spend much time around Mal, you’ll find that’s a fae occupational hazard. They never ask. They simply do.”

  Bryce swallowed. Mal had asked. No, Mal had begged. If that was aberrant behavior in fae, then Bryce had definitely done something to subvert Mal’s will. “What did they do to the achubyddion?”

  “Slaughtered them, mostly. Or took without consent, which is just as deadly. Now take this, right here—I love helping people feel better. It’s why I’ve always wanted to be a nurse.” He wrinkled his nose. “Although I may have wanted to be a nurse because I was achubydd and never knew it.” He laughed and shook his shaggy hair off his forehead. “That’s what’s such a pisser about this supernatural crap. You never know whether you’re doing something because you want to do it, or because some deep, dark, extra-twisted part of your DNA is playing king of the hill with your inclinations.”

  “How do you . . .” Bryce shifted on the couch. “I mean, how can you tell for sure?”

  David shrugged. “Just go with it, I guess. I mean, does it really matter why I want to be a nurse? It makes me happy to help people, which creates a feedback loop that replenishes any energy I use to heal them. Although . . .” He released Bryce’s hands, a frown pleating his forehead. “I can’t do anything really extraordinary with human patients. No curing cancer or anything like that. Just palliative care, helping them feel better. Supes, though, have this extra thing. Auntie always called it a ‘center,’ so I thought it was just a woo-woo meditation concept, but it’s an actual gland or organ or something. My achubydd mojo interfaces with it and voilà—anything goes.”

  The center. Gran had referred to the wee center too. “What do you think would happen if you decided not to be achubydd? Not to use your power?”

  “I’m not sure I could resist, now that I know the truth. I didn’t find out about it myself until June. Before that, Auntie had tried to protect me from discovery by loading me down with a boatload of spells, but all they ended up doing was making everybody around me crazy. She turned me into a kind of anti-achubydd—instead of making everyone feel better, I caused everything from mild discomfort to borderline homicidal mania.”

  Despite himself, Bryce chuckled.

  “You laugh, but the altercations in clubs? The near riots in all the jobs before I started temping for Alun? Not. Funny. It was such a relief to find out none of it had been my fault!”

  “I’ll bet.” Bryce sighed, and David peered at him anxiously.

  “You’re not worrying about apprenticing with Auntie, are you? Just between you and me—” He leaned forward, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I just happened to overhear her telling my Aunt Regan that you had the potential to be the most powerful druid in at least a century, including all of them.”

  “There are more druids?”

  “Oh my goodness, yes. They work in groups, usually. Circles. Aunt Cassie’s circle has six other women in it—my honorary aunts, although if you want to get technical, Cassie’s honorary too. No relation at all, but she rescued me out of foster care when she found out I was achubydd.”

  “So there are other circles?”

  “Sure. All over the place, although most of them are in the UK or the non-Bible-belt parts of the US.”

  Good. I’ve got options. As much as he loved his job, his house, the work he’d done with the wetlands, if staying meant victimizing Mal, he’d leave it all behind. If Cassie didn’t give him an acceptable answer, he’d ask another circle to take him in.

  Although the thought of never seeing Mal again—

  “Hey. What’s going on?” David scooted the footstool closer. “You were fine, and now you’ve got a giant red blob of negative energy swirling around in your chest. Let me—”

  “No!” Bryce knocked his hands away. “I don’t deserve any more of your help.”

  “Everyone deserves to be healthy and pain-free, Bryce.”

  “Not me,” he whispered. “Not after what I’ve done.” What I still want to do.

  David tucked his hands between his knees, clearly respecting Bryce’s wishes. If he can control his biological imperative, maybe I can too. But David was achubydd, not druid. He healed. He didn’t hurt. Didn’t destroy. Didn’t manipulate.

  “You know what I’ve found out since being with Alun? Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone does things they regret, and sometimes the perceived guilt is so huge, at least in our own minds, that we think we’ll never get past it.”

  “Tell that to your garden-variety sociopath.” He crossed his arms, tucking his hands against his sides. “Tell that to Rodric Luchullain
.”

  David’s eyes darkened and his mouth thinned. “Rodric,” he said, as if the name tasted foul and he couldn’t spit it out fast enough. “As far as I’m concerned, everything is his fault.”

  No. Not everything. Some of it’s on me.

  As they stepped off the patio, Mal offered Cassie his arm to support her on the uneven ground. After a few more steps down the hill, he stopped abruptly, measuring the distance from the house—and Bryce.

  “Why can I be this far away from him without your damned leash pulling my guts out?”

  She waved a hand. “I’ve loosened it for a time so we may speak privately. It is not,” she pierced him with a fierce glare, “loosened for good.”

  For some reason, that filled him with relief. He didn’t stop to think what that meant.

  They found Bryce’s glasses halfway down the slope, twenty feet or more from where he’d fallen. Mal folded them carefully and tucked them into a vest pocket, belly clenched in fear. David had said Bryce would be all right, but what could he know about the long-term effects of this kind of attack?

  “Cassie, without this connection between Bryce and me—not your wee tether, but the new one—do you think he’d have survived Rodric’s blast?”

  She leaned on her cane, her gaze fixed on the edge of the woods. “Truthfully? No. He’s come into his power too recently to know how to protect himself.” She cut a glance at him. “Or you.”

  “I don’t need protection.” But on the other hand, refuge—as he’d felt in Bryce’s arms? Goddess, yes.

  She sighed. “You claim these feelings, these actions, are things you have never felt or done before. But tell me, Lord Maldwyn, are they things you have wanted, yet hadn’t the courage to pursue?”

  Mal clenched his fist. “Of course not.”

  “Think carefully. Not all who submit are weak, although in Faerie, where your roles are bred into your very bones, this might be a hard concept to grasp. Think of your struggle—the struggle of the Welsh fae to fit in after Arawn abandoned you to the Queen’s unification plans. How could you ever show weakness then? To do so would mean not only your own dishonor, perhaps your death, but that of your brothers, and all other y Tylwyth Teg who craved a place at this new table.”

  She had a point. The Unification hadn’t been easy for the branches without strong leaders. As the highest ranking Welsh fae, he and his brothers had taken responsibility for the other Welsh refugees.

  Mal had to admit that the Queen had dealt with them graciously, granting the high fae rank equal to their Irish or Scottish counterparts, allowing the lesser fae to choose who and how to serve. But the duty was always there. And two hundred years ago, after Alun had been cursed and exiled, with Gareth still shunning Faerie in his anger and grief, it had been left to Mal to be their champion.

  He didn’t begrudge the duty. Far from it. He was proud to be the standard bearer and advocate for y Tylwyth Teg. But, Goddess, sometimes he just wanted a rest. Was that what he’d been searching for all these years? Someone to take the burden off his shoulders, at least for a little while? Someone he could trust to carry him for a change?

  “So tell me more about this familiar shite.”

  She leaned on her cane, peering up at him out of bird-bright eyes. “If the druid council found out that Mr. MacLeod had purposely initiated an unsanctioned bond—and in this age, any bond not pre-authorized by the council is unsanctioned by definition—he would be punished to the full extent of druid law.”

  Mal’s fight reflex fired at the idea of Bryce being punished. Even when druids were being helpful, it usually involved intense pain for the supplicant—they didn’t believe that anyone should get something for nothing. “There’s no free lunch” was probably coined by a druid priest. Hells, it was probably carved in runes on every bloody oak in the British Isles. He didn’t want to think what they’d do if they intended to penalize someone.

  “No. I won’t have it.”

  Cassie tilted her head. “That notion bothers you?”

  “Yeah. He didn’t do it purposely. In fact, he still doesn’t know he did it at all.”

  “You think not? Perhaps. But ignorance has never been an acceptable excuse among our kind. Knowledge is the coin in which we trade, but instinct is our black market.”

  “Is giving a straight answer to a question a punishable offense too?”

  She chuckled, like the rattling of dry twigs. “No. But I’m not certain you truly wish to know the answer. Or else, you know already, but don’t wish to accept it.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “The bond could not form if both did not desire it. And the bond itself takes the shape that druid and familiar wish it to be.”

  “That’s—” He wanted to say it was ridiculous, but deep down, he wasn’t so sure. Hadn’t he noticed Bryce’s arse from the first? Noticed the way he charged about the bloody wetlands as if he’d subdue it all by the force of his will alone? And what about in the Unseelie sphere, when he’d called the attention of Rodric’s goons with a reckless disregard for his own skin, simply to spare the trees?

  He’d supported Mal too, refusing to leave him behind although it would have made his own escape easier. If that courage and determination, that honor, wasn’t something to trust, what was?

  She held up a hand. “Think before you speak. Remember, words have power. The ones we speak to others, yes, but the lies we tell to ourselves as well. In the past, the bond was always between druid and lesser fae. Lesser fae desire nothing more than honorable service, and druids of old required loyal servants. When a pair found one another well-suited, the bond benefited them both.”

  “Why outlaw it, then?”

  “Because sometimes an unscrupulous druid used . . . dishonorable measures to make the fae believe the bond was acceptable. And once the bond is established, it cannot be broken outside of death.”

  “Comforting.”

  She shrugged. “It is not intended to be something to enter into lightly, as you apparently did.”

  “Oi. I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “Ignorance is no—”

  “No excuse, yeah. But why keep this information so bloody secret?”

  “The supernatural world has changed in the last centuries, Lord Maldwyn. You know it yourself. Our relationship with the Outer World is uneasy at best, destructive at worst. The fae especially seek to find a way to fit, to prove they’re not obsolete even in their own realm. How would they feel to know that their original purpose was to serve as handmaidens to druids, who themselves have diminished in importance?”

  “Doesn’t hiding the information increase the likelihood of unwilling victims?” He’d called Bryce a tree hugger—druids were the originals of that lot. Had he reacted to that deeper knowledge from the first? Had he let himself get caught?

  “As I said, we police our own these days, and the traditional mistrust of druids has been your royals’ effort to lessen the risk.”

  “Never thought the royals gave a rat’s arse about us,” Mal grumbled.

  “Their care is perhaps not for your welfare, but for their own.”

  “Shite, woman. Just tell me without the mystic mumbo-jumbo.”

  “Faerie’s equilibrium is more fragile than you’ve been led to believe, which is one of the reasons fae such as yourself are constitutionally resistant to change. Imagine the havoc that could result from a disgruntled lesser fae backed by druid magic.”

  Mal remembered the revolutionary murals in the hallway of the Unseelie Keep. “I’ll wager that would curl their Majesties’ perfect hair all right.”

  “A true bond between a druid with Mr. MacLeod’s prospects and a highborn fae with your experience and influence?” She chuckled. “Oh, my dear. If they knew, they’d tremble in their slippers at this very moment.”

  “You sound like you’d be glad of that.”

  She shrugged again, a tiny lift of her frail shoulders. “Druids embrace change more than others in the supe communities. W
e must. Our entire lives are bounded by our relationship with nature, and what is nature but constant change? The seasons, the weather, the ebb and flow of the tides. We have long believed that a canker eats at the heart of Faerie. That something must happen if the fae are not to vanish from all the worlds.”

  “That might not be a bad thing,” Mal muttered, thinking of Rodric.

  “You forget that the fulcrum of the world includes Faerie. If it were to vanish, the balance would tip too far toward the humans and their destructive habits. Faerie needs to survive, but it must evolve to fit the times.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Yet your Queen took the first step when she unified all the Celtic fae under a single umbrella.”

  “You mean two umbrellas. The Seelie-Unseelie split is still bloody wide.”

  “As you say. And perhaps that is something that should be healed as well.”

  “Are you saying we should merge all Fae, Seelie and Unseelie?”

  “They are not as different as you suppose, Lord Maldwyn. Think on it, if you doubt me.”

  “Later. Right now I need to know what to do about this bond.” It was easier to breathe out here, farther away from Bryce and his scent and the hypnotic spell of his eyes when they turned black with desire and, bloody hells, he couldn’t think about that now or he’d lose his resolve.

  “As you’ve taken his essence only twice, you can still halt it. After the third time, it can’t be broken outside of the grave.”

  Mal swallowed. Could he handle not having sex with Bryce again? It had been fecking incredible. Better than anything he’d had in . . . well . . . ever. Was that because he’d wanted—needed—that kind of mastery and never found it? “Now that I know about it, I can avoid it.” He hoped.

  “I can give you an herbal tea that you drink twice a day to nullify the effects.”

  “Nasty?”

  “If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t believe it was doing you any good.”

  “Do I take it alone, or do we have to convince Bryce to take it too?”

  “It should be both of you to deliver the full benefit. After all, the bond is a partnership. In your ignorance, you and Mr. MacLeod have already stepped outside the accepted rituals, and while that might not be disastrous, ensuring balance in all else is critical.”